Stock know your 1%

There is a rule that seems to show up all the time that 1% of the population participate, 9% occasionally participate and the other 90% do nothing. It is called the 1% rule although a lot of people call it the 90/10 rule.

We see something like this is stock.

Here is a graph of a reasonable size shop with sales in order of the top selling items to the worst selling items based on retail turnover.

The shop sold in a year exactly 20,060 different stock lines.

Here are some figures, slightly less then 1% actually the top 220 stock lines did 50% of shop sales. But it does down further out of the top 220 stock lines, the top 10 stock lines did about 33% of the shop sales and the top two lines did just over 15% of the shops' trade.

When I first saw this, it hit me like a brick

I think you would have to admit that this is quite amazing. Now what the retailer should do is concentrate most of there efforts on the items that are really making the money.

Now let us find your top 1% stock lines.

Go to register reports and select the top stock report as marked with the red arrow here

You will get this screen

Now select your criteria, note there is also a tab called "More Criteria" which has more options plus the traffic (which is people in the shop) option but we will discuss that later.

I do suggest that you do this by overall shop sales and then research in depth for each department.

Here I used the stationery department. In red, I put in 32000 to make sure I get everything and as I like to get a long-term view, I selected a whole year as small periods can have major fluctuations.